Re: NSE structured output--normal output formatting

[Patrick Donnelly <batrick () batbytes com>]

On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 1:02 AM, Daniel Miller <bonsaiviking () gmail com> wrote:
> I don't think that David is advocating for string output that is
> wholly (or even mostly) different in content from the structured
> output, but rather that the transform function should be called within
> the script body, rather than by the engine, after the fact.

Sorry David for the confusion. I thought you were advocating all
transformations would happen on the script side but after reading your
OP again, I see you want to support all three cases.

As for what I think, I don't yet see an example script that would
benefit from supporting returning both a table and a string. So far
all we have is nfs-ls and that should look like (IMO):

local file = {uid=1000,path="/foo", ...}
local filestr = "drwx------ ...." -- transform code here
output.exports[1].files[1] = stdnse.scriptoutput(file, filestr)

So I'm against this change.

> I am not advocating for abandoning a string representation that cannot
> be recreated from XML structure: there are too many display options
> for it to be obvious how to generate the string.

Not convinced.

> I'll throw in one more advantage for the metamethod approach: nesting
> of different display types. Consider nfs-ls.nse, which has ls-style
> tables of data nested within an outline structure describing each
> export. With metamethods, I "tag" each ls-table with the
> rows-and-columns-style, then insert each into the standard-style
> output table.

This doesn't make sense to me.

> My implementation on Github can already handle this,

Can you start posting patches to the list or make a mirror branch on
svn in /nmap-exp so it's easier to follow? I haven't been able to look
at this and it's becoming quite frustrating during these discussions.
I also want to see what nfs-ls looks like.

Also, how are you handling verbosity now for script output?

-- 
- Patrick Donnelly
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